While Tuesday’s election results put a huge question mark in front of the fate of the Affordable Care Act, the head of the California health exchange has a clear message: Covered California is open for business.

“The benefits for 2017 are there. They are in law and in contracts. The subsidies are there,” Peter Lee, Covered California’s executive director, told The Chronicle on Thursday. “The future is something we don’t know … but we do think California and the experience of Covered California can provide lessons for the nation.”

But how does Covered California encourage people to sign up for coverage under a federal law that President-elect Donald Trump promises to obliterate?

Trump has called on Congress to “repeal and replace” the law, often called Obamacare, but no one knows how that will happen and what will take its place. Even the updated health plan that Trump’s team posted Thursday on his transition website did little to illuminate his strategy. It repeated his call to create high-risk insurance pools, give states more flexibility in administering their Medicaid programs and promote the sale of insurance across state lines.

“President-elect Trump’s health plan of a few paragraphs has virtually no detail, but just enough to raise major alarm about the significant threats to Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and our health system overall,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, an advocacy organization that has supported the federal health law.

What’s clear is that dismantling President Obama’s key health legislation cannot be done in a matter of days, or even months.

“Under any scenario, if people sign up for coverage this year, it will be good for the next year,” said health economist Ben Handel, an associate professor of economics at UC Berkeley. “People probably are worrying if they are signing up in the markets, but I don’t think they need to.”

More than 20 million Americans have gained coverage because of the Affordable Care Act, either through the federal or state exchanges, which offer private insurance to people who do not have it through their jobs, or the expansion of the Medicaid program for the poor.

Covered California has enrolled about 1.4 million people, and more than 3.5 million Californians have gained coverage through Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.

“Covered California has been clearly a standout among the exchanges — if not the most successful, certainly among the most successful,” said Sandra Hunt, a principal in PricewaterhouseCoopers. “If you repeal it, what do you do with regards to those people?”

Hunt and other health experts agree that the exchanges, including Covered California, are unlikely to survive without the federal subsidies that help offset the cost of health insurance. Covered California officials say that about 90 percent of its beneficiaries receive some level of financial help to pay their premiums.

Rising insurance premiums have loomed large over the presidential campaign.

The government announced last month that the average cost of premiums for plans sold in the federal exchange jumped 25 percent for 2017. The news came after several major insurers, including UnitedHealth and Aetna, pulled back their offerings in the exchanges in parts of the country.

In California, premiums are rising by a weighted average of 13.2 percent, three times the modest 4 percent increases of the previous two years. Covered California still has enough health insurers offering coverage to provide some competition — 11 statewide, though the number of options varies by region.

For San Francisco resident Audrey Carlson, who buys her insurance through Covered California, her main fear is not the premium hike she’s facing — a whopping 27.7 percent next year for her Blue Shield of California policy.

Carlson, 60, is worried that some of the Affordable Care Act’s insurance reforms — particularly the one that prohibits insurers from denying members coverage due to pre-existing medical conditions — will be revoked.

A lifelong runner, Carlson fears she will need a knee replacement. She worried that her 27-year-old son, who also gets coverage through the exchange, will have trouble getting coverage in the future because he underwent a test to rule out asthma.

She’s most concerned about the loss of coverage for those who are more financially strapped than she is. “I can pay for health insurance, but there are so many who are just not able and will be ruined financially,” she said.

Federal officials said more than 100,000 people signed up for health insurance plans through the federal exchange, HealthCare.gov, on Wednesday, the most since signups began on Nov. 1.

Covered California’s marketing and outreach blitz for open enrollment, which runs through Jan. 31, starts in earnest now. The state hopes to sign up as many as 400,000 more people.

Lee’s planned bus tour around the state, which starts Saturday in San Diego and ends Nov. 19 in Santa Cruz, will go on as planned — just without the bus.

“We did make the judgment call that driving a big bus that seems like we’re in a big campaign was probably not right thing to do,” he explained.

Victoria Colliver has been writing about health for the San Francisco Chronicle since 2001, focusing on the health care industry, health policy and cancer. Before joining The Chronicle, she worked for the San Francisco Examiner, the Oakland Tribune and the Stockton Record.

A graduate of UC Davis, Colliver received a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.